Oops, I crit my pants

I think it comes as no surprise that Russ and I are kind of very nerdy. It would stand to reason that we would train raise our spawn child to be a nerd as well. Her first nerdy outing was last weekend at PAX11. Russ will tell you more about the convention, but I wanted to mention my highlights. We sat in on a panel for Journey Quest. It's a series of webisodes shot here in Seattle. The cast all have day jobs and do this in their free time. It's perfect for people who like to watch D&D (like me).
Speaking of which! That was the main reason I wanted to go this year. The founder Penny Arcade, Jerry Holkins (tyco) and Mike Krahulik (Gabe) play with Scott Kurtz (from PVPonline) and Will Wheaton (Wesley Crusher, my teen crush). Last years session is at here and I bet this year will be up soon (or probably somewhere on youtube). There is no way I can describe it and do it justice, but it was entertaining.
Saturday was spent with Ivy in a cocoon my chest so there was no way I was going to touch keyboards that hundreds of gamers have already handled. There's a reason people get sick after going to conventions and thanks to obsessive compulsiveness and hand sanitizer, we got out unscathed.
Sunday, however, we were able to go back on the motorcycles (see how I brought it back to riding) thanks to Mom coming over in the afternoon to babysit.
~Michelle


The thing about PAX is that it is not so much a show, as a Nerdstravaganza. There are concerts, panel discussions, Q&A with game makers, artists, developers, and studio bosses, as well as games representing just about every tribe and tongue of geek: board games, dice games, dance games, guitar games, first-person-shooter games, strategy games, console games, computer games, and even sometimes meta-games encompassing multiple activities the crowd is knowingly engaged in or not. You'd be sorely disappointed if you're looking to gain an impression of tense competition amongst attendees with all this focus on gaming. To the contrary, there is a pervasive spirit of camaraderie, of kinship, of shared experience, of common heritage, and of hope that despite the embarrassment of riches gamers enjoy, something better still is just around the corner waiting to be discovered.

It makes sense that PAX should turn out this way. The founders conceived of it out of exasperation at the deficiency of all other conventions serving the interests of gamers. They literally wondered where the convention they would actually WANT to attend was, and not finding it, decided to start their own. They didn't set out to make money off it. The first few years were almost entirely volunteer-supported. From those roots, it grew and expanded into something relevant to folks outside the greater Seattle-metropolitan area until today where it is a bi-coastal, twice-yearly nerd hadj. It is still largely built on the enthusiasm, hard work, ingenuity, and good will of volunteers (called Enforcers). Gaming companies with billion dollar budgets are on the same show floor as garage-based operations without a payroll showing off what they think counts as fun.

It is hard to think of gamers as constituting a culture, but there are memetic currents everywhere, evidenced by in-jokes, songs about things everyone seems to understand no matter how obtuse, iconography, and mutual recognition. It isn't so much that attendees think everything is a game but that as gamers, they share a perspective on how to approach problems, how to get along, and what the normal stratification they withstand for the other 362 days a year means at PAX. I know I've gone on for 3 paragraphs without completely defining what PAX is. I guess you could look it up (the Internet is literally MADE by and for the same folks), but 2nd-hand experience from accounts online are a dim shadow of the real thing. Why not join us next year? Michelle and I will be there, lugging around our motorcycle jackets in the near-stifling crush of people filling the Washington State Convention Center to its full capacity (no joke, they sell out of all passes each year now).
~Russell